The US Postal Service plans to introduce its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages to offset rising energy costs, according to a statement.
The surcharge, set at 8%, is expected to take effect on 26 April and remain in place until 17 January 2027 under the current plan.
Packages under Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage and Parcel Select will be affected by the surcharge.
“Transportation costs have been increasing, and our competitors have reacted with a number of surcharges,” reads the statement by the USPS. “We have steadfastly avoided surcharges and this charge is less than one-third of what our competitors charge for fuel alone, so even with this change, the Postal Service continues to offer great value in shipping with some of the lowest rates in the industrialized world.”
Democrats were quick to voice their concern.
“Groceries. Gas. Now packages. Is there anything Donald Trump hasn’t made more expensive? Call it what it is: the Trump Mail Tax,” said JB Pritzker, governor of Illinois, in a post on social media.
“Trump has messed up on affordability so badly that he’s even managed to make the mail more expensive,” the US senator Raphael Warnock said in a post.
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Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are speaking at the Senate on Wednesday afternoon about their new plan to place a moratorium on AI datacenters.
“Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and its impact on every man, woman and child in this country, AI has received far too little serious discussion here in our nation’s capital,” Sanders said at the presser. “I fear that Congress is totally unprepared for the magnitude of the changes that are already taking place.”
Sanders unveiled the new policy, which he has teased since late 2025, early this morning.
The moratorium would go into effect immediately if passed, and remain in place until laws are enacted to curb datacenters’ harmful effects. That includes quelling their climate and environmental impacts, ensuring they do not push up utility costs, preventing job displacement and “ensuring the wealth generated by [AI] companies is shared with the people of the United States.”.
Importantly, this legislation would also impose a ban on the export of AI chips to any country without such protections, including China.
Ocasio-Cortez will introduce a companion policy proposal in the House.
“Our bills learn from our lack of regulation … and demands a new approach to AI,” she said “One that protects the American people from big tech’s egregious overreach.”
At the conference, Sanders said Democrats have not done nearly enough to curb AI’s impacts on daily life.
“We need to develop a sense of urgency here. The economic impacts are going to be enormous. The impacts on our children will be enormous. And … there is literally an existential threat to the existence of the human race,” he said, explaining that experts have warned him AI “could soon surpass human intelligence and operate independently, beyond our control.
“Why is Congress not moving aggressively? Well, maybe it has something to do with 150 million and more that is coming in to Congress in campaign contributions and in Super Pacs,” Sanders added.
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US Southern Command announced on Wednesday that US forces carried out another “lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea, which left four people dead.
“Applying total systemic friction on the cartels,” US Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said on X.
Attached to the post was a 15-second clip of the strike, which showed the boat bursting into flames.
Here's a recap of the day so far
At a House homeland security committee hearing, Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting administrator of the TSA, said that her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far. This includes the record-breaking lapse in federal funding last year that lasted 43 days. “This Friday, we will have reached nearly $1bn in missed paychecks,” she told members of Congress at today’s hearing. McNeill also said that since it takes four to six months to train transportation security officers (TSOs), any newly hired officers will not be able to work on the checkpoint until well after the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
More on the DHS shutdown: Victoria Barton, an official at Fema, told lawmakers on the House homeland security committee that a portion of her agency’s staff was able to continue working thanks to the Disaster Relief Fund. The fund, though, only has $3.6bn remaining, which could be depleted “pretty rapidly” were there to be a major storm.
At the hearing, Democratic representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, said he was “extremely troubled” by the deployment of ICE to several US airports as the TSA is overwhelmed.
Some airports are officially advising travelers to arrive four hours before their scheduled flights as TSA staff, who have been working without pay for over a month, are not reporting for duty amid the standoff.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats for the long lines at airports, accusing them of “robbing [Transportation Security Administration] officers and other federal workers of their hard-earned paychecks that they use to feed their families.”
Federal prosecutors examined whether Donald Trump showed a classified map to people on his plane after his first term, including to his now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to justice department materials produced to the House judiciary committee. The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
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Vice President JD Vance will visit Hungary on 7 April just days before the central European country’s election in what critics will see as a highly irregular foray into the domestic politics of a foreign country.
Vance’s visit is aimed at boosting the re-election chances of Hungary’s long-serving prime minister, Vktor Orban, a close ally of Donald Trump’s Maga movement, amid polls suggesting his ruling Fidesz party is facing defeat at the hands of his rival, Peter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party.
Orban, who has been Hungarian prime minister since 2010, has visited Trump in the White House and at Mar a Lago several times in recent years and the president has vocally endorsed his re-election.
Politico says the visit has not been made official by the White House. Hungarians go to the polls on 12 April
The Guardian’s congressional reporter, Chris Stein, reports that a potential $200bn request from the Pentagon to pay for the US war effort with Iran was mentioned in a briefing with senators on Wednesday, but it remains unclear if the administration will formally request that amount, the Democratic senator Tim Kaine said.
“It was discussed,” the Virginia lawmaker said after exiting a classified briefing on the conflict held for members of the Senate armed services committee. However, he noted that the defense department had not formally asked Congress for that amount, and it may ultimately request a different number.
“Until they send it, they’re not making the case,” Kaine said.
Earlier in the day, Lindsey Graham, the Republican chair of the Senate budget committee, announced the majority would begin work on a bill that could include Iran war funding and be passed along party lines using the reconciliation procedure.
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An advert for Illinois lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton’s Senate campaign has had to be partly censored for television, Semafor reports – because of its unabashedly potty-mouthed content.
The offending ad consists of a series of Chicagoans declaring bluntly: “Fuck Trump – vote Juliana.”
Adam Magnus of MPWR Media Strategies – the consultant who made the ad – justified the profanity as “our way of capturing voter sentiment”. He added: “It was almost a cleansing exercise for people.”
It may also have captured the increasing crudeness of the current political era. Trump has publicly used the F-word in at least one public exchange with journalists, while JD Vance and the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have freely used “shit” in speeches and social media posts.
Nevertheless, Stratton – who did not use the offending term in her appearance in the ad, in which she appears with Illinois’ Democratic governor, JB Pritzker – was forced to defend it in a televised debate when the moderator invoked Michelle Obama’s famous dictum: “When they go low, we go high.”
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A jury in Los Angeles has found both Meta and YouTube liable in a lawsuit that aimed to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children using their services and could open the floodgates to a spate of similar complaints against online platforms.
The plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman identified alternatively as KGM or Kaley, was awarded $3m in damages. She alleged that her excessive use of social media during childhood left her addicted to the technology and plunged her into mental health problems.
Two other tech giants, TikTok and Snap, settled before the trial began, leaving Meta and YouTube as the only defendants.
The plaintiff said she began using YouTube at the age of six and Instagram when she was nine. She told jurors she was on social media “all day long” as a child.
The trial was one of several that social media companies face this year and beyond and came amid rising scrutiny over the relationship between the platforms’ content and child safety.
Experts have compared the legal reckoning to the defining settlements eventually faced by tobacco and opioid companies.
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Leavitt’s briefing was dominated by questions about the war with Iran, which she insisted had been an overwhelming success while warning that Trump was willing to “unleash hell” if the surviving leadership of the Islamic regime in Tehran continue to resist. Visit our Middle East blog here for more details.
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On the Save America act – proposed legislation which mandates voter ID to address Donald Trump’s allegations of rampant voter fraud – Leavitt said the president “was willing to use any means necessary to get this legislation passed and on to his desk”.
She did not elaborate on what actual means he might resort to.
But Trump’s obsession with a voter fraud problem whose existence is disputed by most experts – and Democrats – has become a defining feature since his defeat at Joe Biden’s hands in the 2020 election, which he falsely says was stolen.
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In another variation of her theme of painting the Democrats as villains in the eyes of inconvenienced air travelers, the White House press secretary said: “I hear that Democrats might be flying out of town tomorrow. How convenient and lovely of them that they get to go to the airport, and that they’ll get to go home to their families.
“When you have families, TSA workers who are suffering, you have people across the country who are missing flights, for funerals and for work commitments because of Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill.”
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Addressing speculation that JD Vance is skeptical about the war with Iran, Leavitt said: “The vice-president has always been … a key member of the president’s national security team. He’s been part of these discussions throughout this entire course of the administration. The vice-president has been by the president’s side every step of the way and any reporting otherwise is just completely false.”
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Hijacking an accusation often leveled by Trump’s critics, Leavitt has repeatedly alleged that “the cruelty is the point” of Democrats’ tactics over the DHS funding impasse.
Leavitt dismissed soaring gasoline prices unleashed by US-Israel war on Iran as a “temporary short-term fluctuation”.
She added: “The president has said, once these combat operations are over, this administration is going to continue to unleash American energy. We’re continuing to do that every day, and we’re going to see prices at the pump go back down.
“This president is keeping them as low as he can during this short-term combat operation. And they’re going to go right back down when this is over.”
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Challenged to address young voters who had voted for Trump based on his promise to keep the US out of wars, Leavitt said: “President Trump is doing this for you. He’s doing this for young people so that we are no longer threatened by a rogue terrorist regime in the Middle East that seeks to kill the brave men and women who serve in our country, in the Middle East, many of them young people themselves, young men and women who served this country honorably, in uniform and have been threatened, killed and maimed by the rogue Iranian terrorist regime for 47 years.”
Leavitt attempts to blame Democrats for long lines at airport security
Leavitt, addressing journalists at a White House briefing, turned the heat on Democrats over the ongoing partial closure of the Department of Homeland Security – which has affected airport security staff.
“Democrats in Congress are forcing American travelers to wait in hours long lines at airports across the country, robbing [Transportation Security Administraton] officers and other federal workers of their hard-earned paychecks that they use to feed their families, and causing billions of dollars in damage to our economy,” she said.
She said nearly 500 TSA officers have quit since what she called “the Democrat shutdown” began.
On the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to airports, she added: “President Trump, to alleviate this pressure, made the decision to send some of our amazing ICE agents to help alleviate that stress and address the long wait times. And for all of the critics of this solution, a few days ago, when it was proposed by the president, it is yielding results. Wait times have improved since ICE arrived, and they are doing everything in their power to help their fellow federal service members.”
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Trump's postpone China visit to happen in mid-May; Xi to visit Washington later this year
Donald Trump’s scheduled visit to China will take place on 14 and 15 May, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has announced.
That is more than six weeks after Trump was meant to travel to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping, the Chinese communist leader. Trump announced last week that he had asked China for a postponement, citing the Iran war.
Leavitt said Xi and his wife would visit Washington later this year for a reciprocal visit, on a date yet to be fixed.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who detained a Guatemalan woman and her nine-year-old daughter at San Francisco international airport on Monday were acting on a tip off from the Transportation Security Authority (TSA), according to the New York Times.
The report sheds fresh light on an incident at the airport that was videotaped and widely shared on social media.
Footage showed the woman, named by the Times as Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, on her knees crying as two plain-clothed agents handcuffed her. An unseen woman repeatedly asks an agent to show his identification card, questioning the detention’s legality.
San Francisco and airport officials initially suggested the woman was in transit with the agents and that she had not been arrested at the airport.
But according to the Times, Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter Wendy were flagged by TSA officials on Friday when their names appeared on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then informed ICE, according to government documents obtained by the paper.
The mother and daughter were living in Contra Costa county in California. Lopez-Jimenez has no criminal history, although she is said to have entered the US illegally.
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White House press briefing
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will speak to reporters shortly, we’ll bring you all the key lines here.
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Prosecutors examined whether Trump disclosed classified map on plane after leaving office
Federal prosecutors examined whether Donald Trump showed a classified map to people on his plane after his first term, including to his now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to justice department materials produced to the House judiciary committee.
The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
The memo also described the documents Trump retained as some of the most protected materials held by the federal government, estimating that one document was accessible to only six people, and alleging that the documents were pertinent to his business interests.
Trump’s alleged disclosure of the map, as described in the memo, would mark the second known time he waved around a classified map in front of Wiles. The indictment charging Trump also described an incident where he showed a classified map to people at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
Here’s the story:
Fema warns of dwindling funds amid DHS shutdown
Throughout today’s hearing, Victoria Barton, an official at Fema, told lawmakers on the House homeland security committee that a portion of her agency’s staff was able to continue working thanks to the Disaster Relief Fund.
However, she later said that the fund only has $3.6bn remaining. If there was another major storm, depending on the magnitude, the fund could be depleted “pretty rapidly”.
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The House oversight committee has postponed its planned interview with Tova Noel, one of the prison guards on duty at the New York facility where Jeffrey Epstein was held the night he died, NBC News reports.
Earlier this month, the panel asked Noel, who has said she believes she was the last person to have seen Epstein alive, to come in tomorrow for a transcribed interview, as part of its investigation into the convicted sex offender’s death.
A spokesperson for the committee told NBC News that the interview was not taking place this week, and the panel was in communication with her attorney about a future date.
The committee requested an interview with Noel after documents released by the justice department suggested she Googled him shortly before he was found dead in his cell in 2019.
Noel and her partner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center that night, Michael Thomas, admitted to not checking on Epstein, who was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and had previously attempted suicide, every 30 minutes as they were supposed to. They were charged with falsifying records, though the case was later dropped.
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'ICE needs to act like every other law enforcement agency,' Democrat says at DHS hearing
During today’s hearing, Democratic representative Seth Magaziner shared a montage of news clips showing the violent tactics used by federal immigration agents during crackdowns across the country, including the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
He also noted that Democratic lawmakers in the House have crafted a bill to separate funding for the TSA, Cisa, Fema and the coast guard – to ensure these agencies can function – as long as Republicans reject reforms for ICE agents.
“Firing Kristi Noem is a good start, but it is not enough,” Magaziner said of Donald Trump’s former DHS secretary, recently replaced by Markwayne Mullin. “ICE needs to act like every other law enforcement agency, with warrants, with badge numbers, with standards of conduct.”
He urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would end the impact on several DHS agencies, while continuing to negotiate over “the much-needed changes to ICE”.
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The White House has posted a bizarre and slightly disconcerting video of Melania Trump appearing on stage with a humanoid at the first lady’s Fostering the Future Together roundtable on AI education.
Footage shows Trump, dressed in white, striding down a red carpet alongside a robot similarly clad in white to a soundtrack of sci-fi-sounding music as a waiting audience applauds.
Trump stops as she reaches the conference room, but the humanoid keeps walking to its right before doubling back to take center-stage. Addressing the room in a female voice, it introduces itself as “Figure three, a humanoid built in the United States of America” and welcomes invitees in a range of languages. Trump and the other invitees respond with a round of applause that comes off as less than spontaneous.
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Democratic representative Shri Thanedar just asked McNeill about the administration’s decision to deploy ICE officers to airports, and how this functions given the fact it takes at least four months to train a transportation security officers (TSO).
McNeill said she was “extremely thankful” that Donald Trump for “leveraging assets” across the DHS.
“We’ve been spending time training [ICE agents] in the last few days and we’re seeing relief,” she added.
Thanedar noted that there have been several images of federal immigration officers milling around airports “looking at their phones or chitchatting”.
McNeill maintained that the agents that have been transferred are conducting “non-specialized screening functions” and that it’s been “incredibly helpful to alleviate the burden on our workforce”.
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Chaplains in the US armed forces will no longer display their military rank, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has announced in a new reform to how men of the cloth under Pentagon command perform their duties.
“The memo I will sign today directs chaplains, all of whom are officers, to replace the rank insignia on their uniforms with their religious insignia,” Hegseth, who has put his own devout Christian beliefs on stark display in the form of body tattoos, said in a video message.
“A chaplain is first and foremost a chaplain and an officer second. This change is a visual representation of that fact, specifically unique to the role of a chaplain. They are first and foremost called and ordained by God.
“While they will retain rank as an officer, to those they serve, their rank will not be visible [and] instead be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling.”
He said the change was meant to “uplift and celebrate the chaplain’s role as a chaplain”.
Hegseth also said that, henceforth, the military would use just 31 faith codes, rather than the current 200, to cater to the varying religious beliefs held across the armed forces.
In 2024, army chaplain corps guidelines said it represented more than 100 different religious groups.
Chaplains in the military are commissioned officers acting as religious leaders and counsellors to service members and their families. The chaplain corps in the US military dates back to 1775, when it was established by George Washington as an exclusively Protestant group. Catholic and Jewish chaplains were introduced during the 19th century. Muslim and Buddhist chaplains became part of the service more recently, in 1994 and 2008, respectively.
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TSA faces 'dire situation' ahead of World Cup security needs, official says
McNeill also noted that since it takes four to six months to train transportation security officers (TSOs), any newly hired officers will not be able to work on the checkpoint until well after the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
“This is a dire situation,” she said. “We are facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at our airports for the World Cup games in less than 80 Days.”
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TSA official: nearly $1bn in missed pay and upwards of half of staff calling out of major airports
Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting administrator of the TSA, said that her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far. This includes the record-breaking lapse in federal funding last year that lasted 43 days.
“This Friday, we will have reached nearly $1bn in missed paychecks,” she told members of Congress at today’s hearing.
“Many in our workforce have missed bill payments, received eviction notices, had their cars repossessed and utilities shut off, lost their childcare, defaulted on loans, damaged their credit line and drained their retirement savings. Some are sleeping in their cars, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she added.
McNeill added that prior to this most recent shutdown, only 4% of TSA employees would not report to work. Now she said that “multiple major airports are experiencing days where 40 to 50% of their staff are calling out” because they cannot afford to work without pay.
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Thompson, the top Democrat on the House homeland security committee, scolded congressional Republicans for doing “Trump’s bidding every time he snaps his fingers and they jump”.
During his opening remarks, Thompson called Wednesday’s hearing a “cover” for the president.
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On Tuesday, Democrats remained unimpressed by Republican lawmakers’ latest proposal to end the partial shutdown of the DHS – which would not include any funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This comes after top brass of the GOP met with Donald Trump to formulate an offer that would hold off appropriating funds for federal immigration enforcement, and save that for another budget bill.
Since ICE received $75bn through Trump’s sweeping policy bill last year, it’s been largely protected from the expired funds that have affected other agencies within the DHS.
Democrats argue that Republicans’ recent plans don’t contain any guardrails on officers, which they have been demanding for months, since the fatal shooting of two US citizens during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, insisted that Democrats will send an updated counteroffer. “And I can assure you, it will contain significant reforms in it,” he told reporters.
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The Senate budget committee is meeting on Capitol Hill to examine the solvency of social security, one of the US’s great political sacred cows dating back to Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s.
Jeff Merkley, a Democrat senator from Oregon, set a pessimistic tone by warning that the system was facing a looming cash crunch and would be essentially bust in six years, on current trajectories.
“The independent estimates by the social security administration and the congressional budget office find that just six years from now, the trust fund is empty,” he said. “Six years from now, that’s like tomorrow. It’s right here for any senator running for reelection this year and their term. The trust fund is out of money … That means that essentially a quarter of the payments would halve, or all the payments would have to be reduced by a quarter, and that would be a huge impact for families.”
Republican chair of House committee: 'The shutdown is not a game'
Top officials at agencies affected by the ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown are testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The lapse in funding for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has lasted 40 days with little end in sight.
During opening remarks, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, Andrew Garbarino, said that the shutdown has caused “massive disruptions” across airports, “weakened our nation’s cybersecurity posture” and “left states unsupported with less than 100 days until the start of major events across the United States, such as FIFA World Cup”.
Garbarino continued to blame his colleagues across the aisle for employees across affected agencies going without pay. “The shutdown is not a game, and frankly, I’m tired of it being treated like one,” he said during his opening remarks. “Mistakes are too high, we owe it to the American people to stop the political games to fund DHS and to get back to regular order.”
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Ranking Democrat on House committee: ICE agents 'cannot do TSA's job, nor should they'
Democratic representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, opens the hearing with a reminder about the violence caused by ICE, a branch of the partially shut down department of homeland security, earlier this year.
“Democrats want to ensure that before we give even more money to ICE and CBP, which is already flush with cash, that we rein in the deadly abuses we saw in Minneapolis. We owe Renee Good and Alex Pretti that much as Good’s family implored the committee in a letter this week.”
Thompson went on to say he was “extremely troubled” by the deployment of ICE to several US airports as the TSA is overwhelmed.
“These agents cannot do TSA’s job, nor should they,” he said. “And they aren’t trained to do it. So we see images of ICE agents standing around or walking through terminals, doing nothing to reduce the lines at security checkpoints, while TSA personnel continue to do their jobs without pay because Republicans refuse to vote for legislation to fund TSA. It’s ridiculous and maddening, but not surprising.”
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House committee to hold hearing on partial DHS shutdown
The House committee on homeland security is about to hold a hearing on the DHS shutdown with officials from its affected agencies.
The speakers include a TSA official as agency staffing shortages result in longer-than-usual security lines across US airports.
We’ll bring you the latest lines from this hearing.
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Politicians on both sides of the aisle have attempted to seize on the airport chaos, with each party pointing the finger at the other.
This morning the Republican senators Tom Cotton and Bernie Moreno took to X to blame Democrats for the partial homeland security shutdown over the party’s stance on issues pertaining to ICE.
“Senate Democrats want to ban ICE officers from wearing masks so their left-wing street militias can dox the officers and terrorize the officers’ wives and children at their homes,” Cotton said. “That’s why TSA lines are so long.”
Democratic senator Mazie Hirono posted a photo of a federal agent on his phone inside an airport while a long line amassed outside. (It was unclear where this photo was taken or obtained.) She wrote: “There is NO need for ICE at our airports.”
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US airports continue to see long lines and fewer TSA staff amid partial DHS shutdown
The partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security continued on Wednesday, as longer-than-usual lines at major US airports have caused turmoil for travelers this week.
Some airports are officially advising travelers to arrive four hours before their scheduled flights as Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff, who have been working without pay for over a month, are not reporting for duty amid the standoff.
On Tuesday, Delta partly suspended its speciality service desk for members of Congress until funding for the TSA is restored. The service desk is used to help members of Congress book flights at special government rates, secure airport escorts and make last-minute flight changes.
On Wednesday, a CBS reporter spotted a familiar face on a long line at Houston’s international airport: former Trump attorney general Bill Barr.
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Cambodian man deported by Trump administration to Eswatini being repatriated, lawyer says
A Cambodian man deported by the United States to the African kingdom of Eswatini under the Trump administration’s third-country program was released on Wednesday to be repatriated after spending five months in detention at a maximum-security prison with other deportees, his lawyer told the Associated Press.
Pheap Rom was deported to the southern African nation in October and held at the Matsapha Correctional Center. He took a commercial flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to start his journey to Cambodia, his US-based lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, told The AP.
The US has sent 19 migrants from other countries to Eswatini in three batches since July. Rom is the second to be repatriated after a Jamaican man was flown home in September.
Two of the leading progressives on Capitol Hill will today introduce legislative proposals intended to protect workers’ rights in the brave new world of artificial intelligence.
Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, will join forces with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative for New York, to launch artificial intelligence data center moratorium ct, which they say would ensure that AI benefits workers, is safe and effective, and does not harm communities or the environment.
It would also impose a moratorium on all new AI data centers pending the imposition of national safeguards to protect workers, consumers and communities and to guarantee privacy and civil rights.
Gavin Newsom describes Elon Musk as 'one of the greatest disappointments of our time'
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, has described Elon Musk as “one of the great disappointments of our time” and accused the billionaire Tesla owner of ceding the electric vehicle market to China.
Talking to Axios, Newsom – widely seen as a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination – that Musk had all but given up on the American EV market that he pioneered by pivoting towards robotics.
“It breaks my heart,” he said, comparing Musk to Thomas Edison.
“I got one of the first Teslas off the line. I’ve been one of their biggest proponents. It was regulation in California that created the conditions that allowed him to take the risk to become the multi-billionaire, maybe trillionaire, that he’s become.
“He is going to allow the greatest own-goal – one of the most significant own-goals in the next decade is ceding the EV space to China. They have 70% of the global EV market. It’s about statecraft with them…It’s a national security play and I really fear what’s going to happen to American legacy automobile manufacturers.”
He attributed some of Musk’s loss of interest in EVs to Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized the cars as a “hoax” and “too expensive.”
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has intensified its investigation of John Brennan, the former CIA director, as Donald Trump seeks retribution for what he has called a “Russia hoax” supposedly meant to discredit his 2016 election victory.
The department requested documents relating to Brennan, who headed the agency during Barack Obama’s presidency, from the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, NBC reported.
The request prompted the committee to vote on Tuesday night to send the DOJ several classified hearing transcripts.
A spokesperson for the committee’s Republican members said the move “may advance the accountability process that many Americans are desperate to see unfold.”
Brennan has been in the DOJ’s crosshairs since Tulsa Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, called for Obama and other national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted for allegedly concocting a “treasonous conspiracy” she said was aimed at showing that Trump’s 2016 election victory was aided by Russian interference.
White House says Trump 'did nothing wrong' amid classified map allegations
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
The White House says Donald Trump “did nothing wrong”, amid reports that he showed off a classified map on a 2022 flight to his New Jersey golf club.
The president also held on to a record from his first term that was so sensitive only six people would have had access to it, according to a letter released on Wednesday by a top House Democrat.
The letter from representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the leading Democrat on the House judiciary committee, adds to the public understanding of the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
It quotes from a newly disclosed Department of Justice memo from January 2023 in which prosecutors cited evidence they said they had accumulated as they moved toward a felony indictment of Trump that would be filed months later.
Responding to Raskin’s letter, the White House said he was not credible. “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80m votes in a landslide election victory.”
The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Trump’s alleged disclosure of the map, as described in the memo, would mark the second known time he waved around a classified map in front of Wiles. The indictment charging Trump also described an incident where he showed a classified map to people at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
Violence continued across much of the Middle East a day after Donald Trump said the US was in “very good” talks with Iran to end the war in the region soon. Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to carry out strikes across Tehran and on other targets in the Islamic Republic. More here.
Democrats managed to flip a seat in the Florida state house in the district that is home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. Emily Gregory, a Democrat, defeated Republican Jon Maples, who had an endorsement from the US president, in the special election in Florida’s 87th state house district. The Associated Press called the race on Tuesday evening, with Gregory, a public health expert and small business owner, leading by more than two percentage points. More here.
Donald Trump on Tuesday swore in Markwayne Mullin as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while Senate Republicans unveiled a compromise that would restart funding to most of the agency but appears to exclude the reforms to immigration enforcement that Democrats have demanded. More here.
Donald Trump has described voting by mail as “cheating” at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, just days after casting a mail‑in ballot himself. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” the US president said on Monday, in remarks to a roundtable on his administration’s crime taskforce. More here.
Workers with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are reeling from the White House’s deployment of immigration law enforcement into airports as TSA workers enter their sixth week without pay as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown continues. More than 400 TSA workers have quit since the shutdown began in February, with major US airports reporting high call-out rates among workers, leading to longer security wait times. More here.
The California governor, Gavin Newsom, backtracked on earlier remarks likening Israel to an “apartheid state” in a new interview with Politico published on Tuesday. In the interview, the Democrat, who is widely expected to launch a presidential bid in 2028, said that when he used the term three weeks ago, he meant it to apply to Israel’s future should it continue on its present trajectory. More here.
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